Simmer Down

him and breaking his heart.
    “Sure is. Sean, this is Hannah,” I said dismissively. “Oliver was her boss.” Would she just leave already?
    “Nice to meet you.” Sean held out his hand to monster girl and looked appalled at my insensitivity. “I’m sorry for your loss. What a dreadful night you’ve had. Are you all right? Would you like a glass of water or anything?” As usual, Sean was the epitome of caring and gentleness.
    Hannah, suddenly demure, thought perhaps she should sit down for a moment. I rolled my eyes as Sean dashed off to find a chair for the damsel in distress.
    Josh had finished with Detective Hurley and joined Hannah and me.
    “They’re taking my Robocoupe and everything from my table, can you believe that? The Robocoupe I can understand. I don’t even want that thing back after what happened. But the platters? My butane burner? What a pain in the neck.”
    “Chloe! They’ve confiscated our flyers!” Naomi had appeared, enraged that the police were collecting all of the Organization’s materials from the evening. I silently thanked the Boston Police Department for saving me from having to sort, file, lug around, and otherwise deal with the countless posters and papers from our table.
    Eliot appeared, looking totally bedraggled and defeated by the night’s events. I couldn’t imagine how upset he must feel that his gallery had become a crime scene. Would the murder really hurt his business? Maybe it would attract ghouls and drive off the kinds of people who bought gigantic granite eggs and oil paintings of operations.
    “Folks,” he said, putting one hand on Naomi’s back and one on Josh’s, “this is obviously a terrible way to end the evening. I know we all had high hopes for publicity and fund-raising tonight, but that all takes a backseat to Oliver Kipper’s murder.” Eliot’s protruding eyes produced a few tears, and he shook his head a few times as if to gather himself together. “I need to stick around, but I’m sure you can all go home.”
    “Not all of you.” Detective Hurley interrupted. He peered down at his notebook. “Hannah Hicks? You’ll need to stay.”

SIX

    THE next morning, I woke up to Josh’s cell phone shrilly echoing throughout my apartment. Ugh. I was on school vacation and was not to be disturbed while catching up on postcrummy-evening sleep. By the time Josh and I had managed to slip past my parents and our exes without formal, awkward good-byes, it had been pretty late. Our drive home had been full of sighing and headshaking and the unspoken agreement that there was no need to pick things apart: not the reemergence of both Hannah and Sean on the same night and not the grotesque murder that had been committed with one of Josh’s kitchen appliances. I think both of us felt embarrassed by our disappointment that the evening had obviously been less about Josh’s food than one would have hoped, so we had kept repeating things like, “How awful!” and “Poor man!”
    Josh had left early to go in to Simmer and had obviously forgotten his cell phone, a lapse that showed how tired he must’ve been when he’d left. But with only two days until New Year’s Eve and the opening, he had a mountain of work to tackle. His phone had been ringing constantly over the past few weeks as he set up purveyors to handle the restaurant’s food supply and searched for kitchen staff. I’d better pick up the phone and give whoever was calling Simmer’s number.
    “Josh’s phone,” I murmured, still half asleep.
    “What? Who is this? I need Josh!” a woman shrieked insanely.
    I completely hate it when someone calls me and then demands to know who picked up the phone. “Who is this?” I asked calmly.
    “Who is this ?” she repeated even more hysterically. “Give Josh the phone now!”
    “This is Chloe. Josh can’t come to the phone. Can I take a message?”
    “What? No, you can’t take a message. This is Hannah, and I’ve been at the police station all night, where I’ve been terrorized by a bunch of idiots who want to know everything about the Full Moon Group and what happened last night, where I was and what I saw! What is wrong with this city? Josh needs to come get me. Please!”
    Oh, God. Even I felt sorry for her. Since she’d spent the entire night at the police station, it was no wonder she was coming unglued. But didn’t she have anybody else in Boston to call besides her ex-boyfriend? Still, there was a limit to how nice I was